NBA: Becoming stronger starts with hard work and mastery

Chapter 170

The old man was beaten.

Yes, this is the challenge that Larry Bird had to face at the beginning of the game tonight. The Indiana Pacers, who were unstoppable in the first two rounds, showed their old age in front of the Boston Celtics led by Han Yi.

Of course, they know that their Pacers are old, but not all teams can take advantage of the old age of the Pacers to play. Let alone catch the Pacers, even if the Pacers took the initiative to catch the opponent, they could have already pinned the opponent in the first two rounds to the ground!

But why did it suddenly not work against this Boston Celtics?

You know, this Pacers team ranks second in the league in offensive efficiency and 13th in defensive efficiency. In terms of defense, this Pacers team is quite average. The reason why they can move forward courageously is because of their offense!

And this Pacers team can be said to be the only one in the NBA that is built around off-ball shooters. Compared with the outside offensive core represented by Iverson and Jordan, off-ball shooters like Reggie Miller have the problem of not being able to consume a lot of ball rights.

Especially in the playoffs where the defensive intensity has increased dramatically, as of 1999, Reggie Miller's highest score in the playoffs was only 39 points, and he never scored more than 40 points once.

Although it's hard to hear, I still have to say, why does Reggie Miller fail every year in the Eastern Conference playoffs? His original sin is to be bad!

But this bad must be aimed at winning the championship. It's not enough to say that Reggie Miller's strength level is not enough. If we only talk about the playoffs, Miller is still quite strong.

If the team built around Reggie Miller is aimed at the playoffs, then it can be stable in the playoffs every year.

Because Reggie Miller has a weakened version of "Curry's gravity". Although he can't always attract double-teaming on the offensive end like Curry, he can always attract the opponent's best defender to run around the court with him by virtue of his top-notch off-ball running ability. In addition, in order to prevent him from receiving the ball, Reggie Miller can always easily tear off the original opponent's defensive formation during his running!

This gives the Pacers other players better shooting space, and no team relies more on shooting space than the Pacers, because they are not only the team leader Reggie Miller who is a pure shooter, but also the elderly Chris Mullin, Mark Jackson now lives by shooting, and more than 70% of the young Jalen Rose's offense comes from outside shooting...

Except for the twin towers in the interior, which are more traditional blue-collar interiors with a focus on defense, the other main offensive points of the Pacers rely on accurate shooting to support the Pacers' offense!

Even Rick Schmitz, a blue-collar center, actually had a pretty good mid-range shot in the paint at that time.

Shooting is inherently unstable, but when all players are shooters and can shoot, multiple instabilities are superimposed on each other, and everyone creates space for each other, the unstable shooting becomes more stable!

Because of this, although the Pacers' number of rounds is only at the middle level of the league, their offensive efficiency, average points per game, and even hit rate are firmly at the forefront of the league.

But what happened today?

The shooter team couldn't make a single shot? Isn't this too ironic?

Is it because the Pacers collectively didn't feel good today? That was indeed a bad feeling, but the reason for the bad feeling was that the Pacers encountered an unexpected strong defense from the Celtics!

McGrady took the lead and relied on his young legs to chase Reggie Miller on the defensive end without anyone else's help.

Joe Dumars and Dell Curry, two old men, hugged the other shooters of the Pacers one by one on the outside.

If it were another team, they would definitely not be able to hug one by one, because they have long legs and can run!

But Chris Mullin, 36, and Mark Jackson, 34, really couldn't run. If they wanted to get open space, they could only hope that Reggie Miller would pull the formation to provide them with open shots.

But Mark Jackson, the master of assists, couldn't help but feel a little desperate when he looked at the Pacers today!

The Celtics' defense was impenetrable!

It's easy to say that they can defend the Pacers one by one, but there are very few NBA teams that can do it, because the Pacers' shooting is not only good because they can shoot, but also because they are one of the few starting three-point shooting teams that can't be ignored!

Reggie Miller's three-point shooting percentage is 38.5%, Chris Mullin's three-point shooting percentage is 46.5%, and Mark Jackson's three-point shooting percentage is 33%!

With this shooting percentage, it goes without saying that the Pacers can provide high-quality space-opening capabilities in the 1990s, an era when most teams had very crowded space.

When facing other teams, the Pacers want to find an open three-point shooting opportunity is just a pick-and-roll, and the only pure blue-collar Dale Davis in the Pacers' starting lineup who has no shooting ability at all is exactly one of the best pick-and-roll players of this era.

But in front of the Pacers, all this no longer works!

Because other people don't have a monster like Han Yi who is 7 feet tall but can move at the speed of a guard!

When Mullin or Reggie Miller's cross screen forced the Celtics to change their defensive matchup, Reggie Miller had clearly run out to an open position, but when the ball just reached him, Han Yi had already covered him like an impenetrable wall.

Similarly, as long as the Pacers players found an open position, when the ball was passed to them, the open position would inevitably be blocked by the omnipresent Han Yi.

It is no problem for the No. 4 position to participate in the defense on a large scale. In the 1990s NBA, such inside players who can widely assist in defense are absolutely scarce resources, but they are not unavailable, such as Kevin Garnett, who just got the league's top salary!

One of the selling points of this guy is his exaggerated mobility. Although his single defense ability is just so-so, his assist defense ability is full. However, Garnett's assist defense can only interfere with the outside players to a considerable extent in the mid-range position, while Han Yi actually directly assists on the three-point line!

Although the Pacers' consecutive misses at the beginning of the game improved after Larry Bird's timeout, the problem of the Pacers' continued poor offense still exists!

And for the aging Pacers, it will be difficult to win this game if the offense is not smooth!

Looking at Han Yi who was still saving and defending everywhere, Mark Jackson felt a toothache:

"Such a monster can actually exist in the real NBA world. Is this really reasonable?"